IntroductionAbit have been in the computer market for well over 4 years, while Abit do not make many if any sales to companies such as Compaq, IBM or Dell they do have a very strong hold on the overclockers market. This was discovered when Abit released the Abit IT5H. This motherboard was the first of many Abit board to incorporate the new jumperless technology.
The jumperless design meant that the user could set the CPU speed and many other CPU related features such as core voltage and I/O voltage within the BIOS. When Abit moved to the Pentium II line Abit redesigned the jumperless design to give the user more flexibility in settings for the CPU and named it "Softmenu II". This proved to be a big hit as Abit sold many of the new BX6 and BH6 motherboards based on this new technology to overclockers. When ATA-66 came to the market Abit took their Softmenu II software, redesigned it to give even more flexibility in the BIOS for the CPU, ATA-66 controller and added it onto a BX motherboard and released the BE6 motherboard. This was a huge hit due to the well loved and super performance of the BX chipset and also being able to have the ATA-66 hard disk controller and up to 8 IDE drives. ABit’s first AMD Athlon board came in the form of the KA7.
Using the VIA Apollo KX133 chipset this motherboard turned out to be quite a hit. With 4 DIMM slots (which no other KX133 board elected to have), 6 PCI, 1 ISA and no AMR this was a huge hit, only 2 problems came out of the board, 1) since it used 4 DIMM slots this motherboard could not accept VCM SDRAM modules. 2) To use 4 DIMM slots Abit added a 6 chip memory buffer set, while this can be helpful for overclocking stability, many memory modules suck as Kingmax PC133 and PC150 SDRAM modules would not operate on this board at speeds over 110MHz due to the TinyBGA not liking the memory buffer. When Highpoint released the HPT370 ATA-100 controller Abit used the same board as the KA7 and added in the extra IDE controller, this added support for up to 8 IDE drives and also the new IDE RAID support.
When AMD announced the release of the socket classed Athlon CPU and VIA announced the new KT133 chipset for socket Athlon’s Abit Released the KT7 and KT7 RAID motherboards. Again ABIT had a hit in their shoulders. With the release of the KT133A chipset supporting 266MHz FSB, ABIT took their KT7 motherboard and replaced the KT133 Northbridge with the KT133A and replaced the 686A Southbridge with the 686B and named them the KT7A and KT7A RAID. Now with the releases of the cost affective KT133E chipset ABIT have designed a cost affective board based on it and have dubbed it the KT7E.
